INFORMATION ETHICS

FOR AND FROM AFRICA

Rafael
Capurro

Keynote address at the African Information
Ethics Conference Pretoria (South Africa), 5th to 7th February
2007. Published in the International
Review of Information Ethics (IRIE)
(2007). Reprinted in: Journal
of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (59 (7):
1-9, 2008.

CONTENT

ABSTRACT

This paper deals in
the first part with some initiatives concerning the
role of information ethics for
Africa such as NEPAD, UN ICT and AISI particularly since the World Summit on the Information Society.
Information Ethics fromAfrica
is a
young academic field. Not much has been
published so far on the impact of ICT on African societies and
cultures from a philosophical perspective. The second part of the paper
analyses some recent research on this matter particularly with regard
to the concept of ubuntu.
Finally the paper addresses some issues of the African Conference on
Information Ethics held in Pretoria, 3-5 February 2007.

“The fundamental cure for
poverty is not money but
knowledge”

Sir William Arthur Lewis

INTRODUCTION

On behalf of the
participants of the African Conference on Information Ethics let me
thank
President Thabo Mbeki and the South African Government for sponsoring
this
outstanding event. Let me also thank the Department of Information
Science at
the University of Pretoria, the School
of Information Studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
and the members of the InternationalCenter
for Information Ethics for their commitment in organizing this meeting.
This paper deals in the first part with some initiatives concerning the
role of information ethics for
Africa such as NEPAD, UN ICT and AISI particularly since the World Summit on the Information Society.
Information Ethics fromAfrica
is a
young academic field. Not much has been
published so far on the impact of ICT on African societies and
cultures from a philosophical perspective. The second part of the paper
analyses some recent research on this matter particularly with regard
to the concept of ubuntu.
Finally the paper addresses the issues and outcome of the African Conference on
Information Ethics held in Pretoria, 3-5 February 2007.

The theme of this
conference, namely “The Joy of Sharing Knowledge,” echoes the core
ideas of the World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS), as stated in the Geneva Declaration of Principles as well as
becoming a part of the Tunis Agenda
for the Information
Society. Let
me recall you the statement of the Geneva Declaration concerning the
“Ethical
dimensions of the Information Society”:

57.We
acknowledge the importance of ethics for the Information Society, which
should
foster justice, and the dignity and worth of the human person. The
widest
possible protection should be accorded to the family and to enable it
to play
its crucial role in society.

58.The
use of ICTs and content creation should respect human rights and
fundamental
freedoms of others, including personal privacy, and the right to
freedom of
thought, conscience, and religion in conformity with relevant
international
instruments.

59.All actors in the
Information Society should take appropriate actions and preventive
measures, as
determined by law, against abusive uses of ICTs, such as illegal and
other acts
motivated by racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related
intolerance, hatred, violence, all forms of child abuse, including
paedophilia
and child pornography, and trafficking in, and exploitation of, human
beings.”
(Geneva
Declaration of Principles 2003)

The participants of the Tunis summit shared the Geneva vision with the following
words:

“2. We reaffirm our desire and commitment
to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented
Information
Society, premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of the
United
Nations, international law and multilateralism, and respecting fully
and
upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so that people
everywhere
can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, to
achieve
their full potential and to attain the internationally agreed
development goals
and objectives, including the Millennium Development Goals.” (Tunis
Commitment, 18.11.2005)

President Mbeki reaffirmed
this commitment from an African perspective in his statement to the
second
phase of the World Summit on November 16, 2005:

“Our country and continent are determined
to do everything possible to achieve their renewal and development,
defeating
the twin scourges of poverty and underdevelopment. In this regard, we
have
fully recognized the critical importance of modern ICTs as a powerful
ally we
have to mobilize, as reflected both in our national initiatives and the
priority programmes of NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development.

We are therefore determined to do
everything we can to implement the outcomes of this World Summit on the
Information Society and appeal to all stakeholders similarly to commit
themselves to take action to translate the shared vision of an
inclusive
development-oriented information society into practical reality.”
(Mbeki 2005)

The idea of this
conference emerged in October 2004 during the international symposium
“Localizing the Internet. Ethical Issues in Intercultural Perspective”
held in
Karlsruhe (Germany)
organized by the InternationalCenter for
Information
Ethics and sponsored by Volkswagen Foundation. All the leading
international
experts in the field of information ethics were invited to participate.
It was
the first of its kind, dealing with information ethics from an
intercultural
perspective. Themes discussed included issues such as the impact of the
Internet for social, political, cultural and economic development,
addressing
particularly questions related to privacy, access to information,
intellectual
property rights, quality of information, security, advanced capitalism
and the
digital divide. All participants were aware of the intercultural
challenge of
such a meeting at which some fifty scientists from all over the world
participated. During this symposium it became clear that the African
continent
was not well represented. There was one representative from South Africa, which happened to be
Johannes Britz, one
of the
initiators of this conference, as well as Willy Jackson, a
representative
from Cameroon, and
Issiaka Mandé, Burkina Faso
(the latter two both live in Paris).
There were of course many reasons why more African scholars were not
present.
Some were unknown to other international scholars, and lack of funding
to attend international events was and still remains a
serious stumbling block.

The participants of the
ICIE symposia were well aware of the urgent need to thoroughly
research the ethical challenges that the introduction of information
and
communication
technology poses for the African continent. They include the problem of
development, particularly the eradication of poverty,
the protection and promotion of
indigenous
knowledge, the archiving of African websites, and especially rights to
communicate and to access knowledge in a digital
environment so that Africans can become part of the emerging knowledge
economy.
We can summarize these issues under the label information ethics for and fromAfrica.

INFORMATION ETHICS FOR
AFRICA

At the celebratory opening
of New Partnership for Africa’s
Development
(NEPAD) offices at the South African Council for Scientific and
Industrial
Research, CSIR
President and CEO, Dr Sibusiso Sibisi
emphasised the unwavering commitment to the work done by NEPAD. Dr Ivy
Matsepe-Casaburri,
Minister of Telecommunications of South Africa said on this
occasion:

"In this era of the Information
Society, ICTs are regarded as tools for development. It is incumbent on
us to
commit ourselves to use these tools to create a better life and a more
humane
world (…) I have faith in NEPAD because it is a home-grown, ambitious
but
realisable project of the African Union. Gone are the days when people
solved
our problems for us and not with us," (Matsepe-Cassaburri 2005)

The Presidential
Commission on Information Society and Development (PNC on ISAG) has
made major
contributions to attain this goal in South Africa. It explicitly
adheres
to the WSIS vision of an information society as one

“where everyone can create, access, utilize
and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities
and
peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable
development and improving the quality of lives.” (ibid.)

Another important promoter
of a humane information society is the South Africa NGO Network
SANGONeT,
founded as Worknet in 1987 and devoted to involving civil society in
the ICT
process.

Since the WSIS,
African societies have been keenly aware that sustainable
socio-economic development requires appropriate information and
communication
technologies. This awareness was already evident at the
African
Information Society Initiative (AISI) launched in 1996 and coordinated
by the
UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Its goal is to create a
pan-African
ICT network giving Africans the means to improve the quality of their
lives and
fight against poverty. AISI’s focus areas aim at promoting sectoral
applications of ICT for eradicating poverty and improving quality of
life. This
implies

AISI has already achieved
some of these goals. It provided support to 28 African countries to
develop
their own national ICT infrastructure. There are periodic consultations
starting with the Global Connectivity for Africa Conference which took
place in Addis Ababa
in 1998, and
the evaluation of ICT impact (Scan-ICT Project). AISI organized a Media
Training Workshop at Addis Ababa as
well as a
forum on ICT’s, Trade and Economic Growth in Addis Ababa in March 2006.Workshops on regional information and
communication infrastructure have taken place since 2004 in Nairobi,
Tangiers, Dar es Salaam, and Kigali.

The UN ICT Task Force
published a report in 2003, edited by Joseph O. Okpaku (2003). His
Excellency
Kofi A. Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations stated in
his
contribution, “Communication Technologies: A Priority For Africa’s
Development”:

“Clearly, if we are to succeed, the process
must engage all stakeholders: donors, the private sector, civil society
organizations, governments, and especially those in the developing
world
itself.” (Annan 2003, xvii)

In the contribution to
this report by Emmanuel OleKambainei, Chief Executive and Program
Director for
the African Connection Centre for Strategic Planning and Mavis Ampah
Sintim-Misa, former Chief Executive Officer of this Centre, write:

“(…) there is a need to promote general ICT
diffusion and raise awareness and appreciation as well as e-literacy
among our
populations, especially children and youth. This should be coupled with
efforts
to demystify and de-demonise ICT for people to accept it as an everyday
tool
and not an end to itself.(…) This can
be done by targeting and ensuring that basic education and literacy
change from
the traditional “3Rs” (reading, writing and arithmetic” to a higher
standard
that can be referred to as “LNCI” or Literacy – reading and writing,
Numeracy –
working with numbers, Communicacy – communicating effectively,
Innovativeness/Initiative.
Success in this (…) will give Africa’s
education, human resource development, as well as research and
development the
ability to “cheetah-pole-vault” so as to catch-up with the rest of the
global
community.” (OleKambainei and Sintim-Misa 2003)

Africa needs,
indeed, a
“cheetah-pole-vault” ICT strategy and not just a leap-frog one.

Joseph O. Okpaku,
President and CEO of Telecom Africa Corporation, writes in the
introduction:

“To a large extent, wealth has a vertical
structure in African society, with most families consisting of the
entire
range, from the well-off to the most needy. The structure of family
obligations
in traditional Africa makes the
pursuit of the
collective advancement of the entire community a norm. The disruption
of this
model, through “modernization”, has been a threat to reaping the
benefits of
this tradition for contemporary African development.” (Okpaku 2003, 11)

Okpaku offers a vision of
a society in which everyone has a central role to play. This vision
corresponds to the original structure of African society based
on the
pre-eminence of the “extended family and its mutuality of care, concern
and
support.” (Okpaku 2003, 13). In other words, Africa’s
scholars and politicians must retrieve their own social traditions in
order to
create a humane and authentic African information society. Some first
steps have already been taken. The Africa preparatory conference for
the WSIS in Tunis
that took place in Accra
in February 2005 specified
that the
goal of the African information society community must include
all
stakeholders:

“Building the information and shared
knowledge society will contribute to achieving the Millenium
Development Goals
to improve quality of life and eradicate poverty by creating
opportunities to
access, utilize and share information and knowledge.” (Accra 2005)

The African Internet
Service Provider’s Association envisaged in February 2005 the following
actions:

“Given that Africa
is the most unwired continent in the world, and yet is part of the
Information
Society, action should be taken (…):

- A
regional multi-stakeholder coordination body be mandated to co-ordinate
and
ensure collaboration among the numerous existing projects in Africa
under the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)

- Regulators
adopt an open and transparent licensing and regulatory regime that
propels the
access to and building of ICT infrastructure.

- The
private sector participates in the technological dynamics of the
development
and also provides hard investment.

- Civil
society creates interest in consumers to demand and ensure service
delivery
quality and return for money.

- Donnors
support this development by providing and facilitating access to soft
financing
and expertise where necessary for PASSIVE infrastructure

- Finally,
that all the stakeholders above subscribe to the horizontal layering of
the
communication system in the manner of physical layer (infrastructure),
followed
by the logical layer, applications layer, content layer, etc.” (AfrISPA
2005)

A recent study on “Ethics
and the Internet in West Africa” by Patrick Brunet, Oumarou
Tiemtoré, and
Marie-Claude Vettraino-Soulard, based on field surveys of five nations
in West
Africa two Anglophone, The Gambia and Ghana, and three Francophone,
Burkina
Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal, raises key ethical issues
that, once identified, should ensure the adaptation of
Internet
technology and its integration into the development of African nations
(Brunet,
Tiemtoré,
Vettraino-Soulard 2004). According to the authors, certain
technologies such
as the cellular phone might more readily and efficiently be developed
in
Africa and can contribute, for example, to the dissemination of medical
information and to South-South cooperation. In order to avoid
the
digital gap within African societies, African governments could
democratize
telecommunications to ensure access for the most disadvantaged people.
But, as
the authors emphasise, the Internet is no panacea. Their work shows
why information ethics matters, politically, socially and
academically. It
matters not only for Africa but from
it.

INFORMATION ETHICS FROM
AFRICA

Information Ethics in Africa is a
young academic field. Not much has been
published on the role that African philosophy can play in thinking
about
the
challenges arising from the impact of ICT on African societies and
cultures.
Most research on ICT from an ethical perspective takes its departure
from
Western philosophy. Let us review very briefly some recent works on
African
philosophy that are relevant in a negative or positive sense to the
subject of
this conference.

African oral and written
traditions of philosophy have a long and rich past, going back as far
as 3000
BC with the Egyptian Maat-Philosophy of ancient Egypt, the
Afro-Hellenic tradition of Greek and Roman Antiquity and the
early
Middle Ages (Amasis, Plotinus, Philon, Euclid, Apuleius, Tertullian,
Augustine), the Afro-Islamic tradition (Al-Farabi, Averroes, Ibn
Battuta), the
colonial break with contributions in the amharic
language (ZaraYoqob, WaldaHawat, Amo,
Hannibal), the anti-colonial philosophy (DuBois, Garvey,
Césaire, Senghor), the
ethno-philosophy of the 70s (Kagame, Mbiti), Afrosocialism (Nkruma,
Nyerere),
universalistic theories (Houtondji, Wiredu, Towa), and contemporary
representatives of different schools such as hermeneutics (Okere,
Ntumba,
Okonda, Serequeberhan, Kinyongo), Sage-philosophy (Oruka, Kaphagawani,
Sogolo,
Masolo) (Oruka/Masolo 1983), and feminism (Eboh, Oluwole, Boni, Ngoyi),
to mention just a
few
names and
schools. These traditions have been recently analysed by Jacob Mabe in
his book
on oral and written forms of philosophical thinking in Africa
(Mabe 2005, 276-278; Ruch/Anyanwu 1981;
Neugebauer 1989;
Serequeberhan 1996). He has also edited the
first comprehensive lexicon on Africa
in German (Mabe 2004), with more
than 1000 keywords including entries on "media" and the "Internet"
(Tambwe 2004).

The Department of
Philosophy at the University
of South Africa has published
a comprehensive reader Philosophy
from Africa,
edited by
Pieter
Coetzee and Abraham Roux (Coetzee/Roux 2002). Of the 37 contributors
33 are
Africans speaking for themselves on the topical issues of
decolonization,
Afrocentrism in conflict with Eurocentrism, the struggle for cultural
freedoms
in Africa, the historic role of black consciousness in the struggle for
liberation, the restitution and reconciliation in the context of
Africa’s
post-colonial situation (Eze 1997), justice for Africa in the context
of globalization,
the pressures on the tradition of philosophy in Africa engendered by
the
challenges of modernity, the reconstitution of the African self in its
relation
to changing community, the African epistemological paradigm in conflict
with
the Western, and the continuity of religion and metaphysics in African
thought.
The second edition contains themes on gender, race and Africa’s place in the global context. Although
the book
addresses a broad variety of themes there is no contribution
dealing
specifically with information and communication technologies from an
ethical or even
philosophical perspective, although Paulin Houtondji
addresses the problem of “Producing Knowledge in Africa Today”
(Houtondji
2002). The terms '"information" and "communication" are absent, not
even listed in
the
index.

Is there a specific
African philosophic and ethical perspective with roots in African
languages,
social experiences and values as analyzed for instance by John Mbiti,
(1969),
Chyme Gyekye (1996), Mutombo Nkulu (1997), Luke Mlilo and
Nathanael Soédé (2003) and Jean-Godefroy Bidima (2004)? Yes there
is, if we follow Mogobe
Ramose’s contribution to this reader (Coetzee/Roux 2002) that bears the
title
“Globalization and ubuntu” (Ramose
2002), but also, for instance, Kwasi Wiredu’s contribution on the
“conceptual
decolonization in African culture” through an analysis of African
languages and
terminology (Wiredu 1995; Weidtmann 1998). I am not making a plea for
ethnophilosophy as criticized for instance by Houtondji (1983), but for
a
dialogue between both cultures and languages, and the global and the
local as
envisaged
in the 2004 symposium of the International Center for
Information
Ethics (Capurro, Frühbauer, Hausmanninger 2007). My position is
related to
Wiredu’s and Oladipo’s interpretation as a “third way in African
philosophy”
(Oladipo 2002) as well as to Oruka’s “sage philosophy” (Oruka 1990). My
view aims at
a critical analysis of the oral and/or written African traditions, as
analyzed
for instance by Anthony Appiah in his article for the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Appiah 1998). I explicitly
acknowledge modern reason without assuming that
its
manifestations are inviolable, particularly when they serve the
purposes of
colonialization. I locate ethical discourse between the particular and
the universal. My aim, following the Kantian tradition, is
universality, but I am aware,
with
Aristotle, that moral and political utterances are contingent,
subject to
different interpretations and applications based on economic interests
and
power structures. They are also objects of a critical analysis that
envisages
the good and seeks a humane world free from the dogmatic fixations of
norms
that merely reflect, implicitly or explicitly,
particular points of view. In other words, ethics reflects on the permanent flow of human life and its modes of empirical
regulation that make possible, on the basis of mutual respect,
manifestations of humanity in unique and multiple forms. We are
all equal,
and we are all different.

According to Ramose, ubuntu is “the central concept of social
and political organization in African philosophy, particularly among
the
Bantu-speaking peoples. It consists of the principles of sharing and
caring for
one another.” (Ramose 2002, 643). Ramose discuses two aphorisms “to be
found in
almost all indigenous African languages,” namely: “Motho ke
motho ka batho” and “Feta
kgomo tschware motho.” The first aphorism means that “to be human
is to
affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others and, on
that basis,
establish humane respectful relations with them. Accordingly, it is ubuntu which constitutes the core
meaning of the aphorism.” The second aphorism means “that if and when
one is
faced with a decisive choice between wealth and the preservation of
life of
another human being, then one should opt for the preservation of life.”
(Ramose
2002, 644). Following this analysis we can ask: what is the role of ubuntu in African information ethics?
How is the intertwining of information and communication
technology with
the principles of communalism and humanity expressed in aphorisms such
as “Motho ke motho ka batho” which can be
translated as “people are other people through other people”? What is
the
relation between community and privacy in African information society?
What
kind of questions do African people ask about the effects of
information and communication technology in their everyday lives?

One of the few detailed
analysis of the relationship between ubuntu
and information ethics, or more precisely, between ubuntu
and privacy was presented by H. N. Olinger, Johannes Britz
and M.S. Olivier at the Sixth
International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry
(CEPE
2005). They write:

“The African worldview driving much of
African values and social thinking is “Ubuntu” (Broodryk, 2004). The
Ubuntu
worldview has been recognized as the primary reason that South Africa
has managed to successfully transfer power from a white minority
government to
a majority-rule government without bloodshed (Murithi, 2000). The South
African
government will attempt to draft a Data Privacy Bill and strike an
appropriate
balance within the context of African values and an African worldview.”
(Olinger/Britz/Olivier 2005, 292)

According to the authors, Ubuntu ethical principles have been
applied in South
Africa
in the following areas:

- Politics (the African
Renaissance

)
- Business (through
collective learning, teamwork, sustainability,
a focus on local community, and an alternative to extractive capitalism
)
- Corporate governance (though the attitudes of fairness,
collectiveness, humility)
- Restorative justice (through the use of dialogue, collective
restitution and healing)

The authors emphasise the
specificity of the Ubuntu worldview
as a community-based mindset, opposed to Western libertarianism
and individualism
but close to communitarianism. The
Nigerian philosopher Simeon Onyewueke Eboh has written a profound study
on
“African Communalism” (2004). Olinger, Britz and Olivier remark
critically that
the population of southern Africa has
to
rediscover Ubuntu because many have not experienced
it, and also because many live in two different cultures, practicing Ubuntu
in the rural environments and Western values in the urban environments.
If this
is the
case, not only in South
Africa but in other African
countries
then there is a lot of theoretical and practical work to be done!

The
authors
translate the aphorism “Umunto ungumuntu
ngabanye abantu” (Nguni languages of Zulu and Xhosa) as “A person
is a
person through other persons” (Olinger/Britz/Olivier 2005, 293).
According to
Broodryk (2002), Ubuntu is an African
worldview “based on values of intense
humanness, caring, respect, compassion, and associated values ensuring
a happy
and qualitative human community life in a spirit of family.” This means
that
personal privacy – being a key
ethical value in Western countries – might
be
considered as less important from an Ubuntu-based
perspective, even if we accept that there are several conceptions of
privacy in both the West and the East (Ess 2005, Capurro 2005). In a
comparative study
of ethical theories in different cultures, Michael Brannigan addresses
African
Ethics with the utterance “To Be is to Belong” (Brannigan 2005). An
analysis of
this thesis could lead to a foundation of African information ethics
based not upon the
abstract or metaphysical concept of Being of some classical
Western
ethical
theories, but upon the experience of Being as communal existence. The
task of
such an analysis would be to recognize the uniqueness of African
perspectives as well as commonalities with other cultures and
their
theoretical expressions. This analysis could lead to an interpretation
of ICT
within an African horizon and correspondingly to possible vistas for
information policy makers, responsible community leaders and, of
course, for African institutions.

Johannes Britz chaired a
session on ICT in Africa at the Ethics
and Electronic Information in the Twenty-First Century (EE21)
symposium at
the University of Memphis (Mendina/Britz 2004). He
said that an important condition of Africa's
finding a place in the twenty-first century is a well-developed
and
maintained ICT infrastructure. Both Britz and Peter John Lor, former
Chief executive
of the
National Library of South Africa, think that the
present
north-south flow of information should be complemented by a south-north
flow
in order to enhance mutual understanding. They plea for a shift toward
the
recognition of the “local” within the “global,” following the idea of
“thinking
locally and acting globally.” In ethical terms, this means respect
for different local cultures and strengthening their active
participation
in intercultural dialogue (Lor/Britz 2004, 18). Although Africa is
still far from a true knowledge
society,
there is hope of success on certain fronts, such as investment in
human
capital, stemming the flight of intellectual expertise, and the
effective
development and maintenance of IT infrastructure (Britz et al. 2006).
Dick Kawooya (Uganda
Library
Association) stresses the ethical dilemma confronting librarians and
information
professionals in much of sub-Saharan Africa, namely
concerns about general literacy, information literacy, and access to
the Internet on the one hand, and “dwindling budgets” for educational
institutions,
particularly libraries, on the other (Kawooya 2004, 34). Michael
Anyiam-Osigwe, chief executive of the Africa Institute for Leadership,
Research
and Development, stresses the importance of ICT towards attaining
sustainable
democracy in Africa (Anyiam-Osigwe
2004).
According to Coetzee Bester, a former member of parliament in South Africa and co-founder of the
Africa
Institute for Leadership, Research and Development, the problem of ICT
in Africa includes all stakeholders.
He writes:

“A program to reconstruct
communities as
holistic entities is necessary. This should include leadership,
followers, agree-upon
principles and values as well as effective interaction among all these
elements.” (Coetzee Bester 2004, 12)

A value-based
reorientation implies personal awareness, an understanding
of
information, effective interactions between leaders and their
communities without limitations of time and space, and mutual
confidence in
representative
leadership.

In the already mentioned
study on “Ethics and the Internet in West Africa”
(Brunet/Tiemtoré/Vettraino-Soulard 2004) the authors identify
six types of
ethical issues related to the development of the Internet in Africa
but also relevant for other countries, namely:

There is no such thing as
a morally neutral technology. This is not to say just that technologies
can be used and misused, but to express the deeper insight that all
technologies
create new ways of being. They influence our relation with one another,
they shape, in a more or less radical way, our institutions, our
economies,
and our
moral values. This is why we should focus on information
technology
primarily from an ethical perspective. It is up to the African people
and
their leaders to question how to transform their lives by these
technologies.
African educational and research institutions should also reflect
critically on these issues. In their
analysis of the
impact of “new technologies” on “ancient Africa” Willy Jackson and
Issiaka Mandé
point to the problem that the development of the information society in
Africa “comes up against a
lack of financing and the
unsuitability of the legal and statutory frameworks”
(Jackson/Mandé 2007, 175).

As Bob Jolliffe, senior
lecturer
in computer science at the University of South
Africa, has
pointed out there is an implicit connection between free software, free
culture, free science, open access, and the South African Freedom
Charter
(Jolliffe 2006). A major task of information ethics in South Africa
as well as in other
African countries, is to align such ideals with concrete social,
political, economic and technical processes. ICT in Africa
should become a major contribution for opening “the doors of learning
and
culture” to use the wording of the Freedom Charter. The space of
knowledge as a
space of freedom is not, as Jollife rightly remarks, an abstract ideal.
It has
a history that limits its possibilities. It is a space of rules and
traditions of specific
societies, in
dialogue with their foundational myths and utopian aspirations. We are
morally
responsible not only for our deeds but for our dreams. Information
ethics
offers an open space to retrieve and debate these information and
communication myths and utopias.

The main moral
responsibility of African academics is to enrich African identities by
retrieving and re-creating African information and
communication
traditions. From this perspective, cultural memory is an ethical
task if we want to create a humane
community basednot just on the number of
people but on the relations between them, as the German Egyptologist
Jan
Assmann
remarks following Friedrich Nietzsche in his Genealogy
of Morals (Assmann 2000, Nietzsche 1999, vol. 5,
294-300). Cultural memory must be re-shaped again
and
again to build the core of a humane society. This means no more and no
less than basing morality on memory and communication, thereby
establishing
information ethics at its core. The function of cultural memory is not
just to express what belongs to the collective
memory of a community, but to engage the will of its members to connect
themselves
through the task of creating it. Cultural memory is connective.
It is related to our myths and to our dreams. We remember Nietzsche’s
ambiguous
warning: “You
want to be responsible for everything! But not for your dreams!”
(Nietzsche
1999, vol. 3, 117). I call this warning ‘ambiguous’ because Nietzsche,
no less
than Sigmund Freud, was well aware of the limits of human will and our
tendency
to repress or forget what we consider painful. The Egyptian god
Thot is a
symbol of cultural memory as a social task. He is the god of wisdom and
writing
as well as messenger of the gods, particularly of the sun god Re, and
is
associated with the goddess Maat, the personification of justice. Thot,
the Greek Hermes, was represented as an ibis- (or a
baboon)
headed man with a reed pen and a palette, known in the Western
tradition through Plato’s criticism of writing in
his Phaedrus.

I think that retrieving
the African cultural memory with regard to information
and
communication norms and traditions is the main information challenge
for African information ethics.
It should recognize the different strategies of social inclusion and
exclusion
in the history of African societies, including traumatic
experiences such as
slavery and apartheid. Since the emergence of the Internet, this
challenge is discussed under the heading of the digital divide. But
African information ethics
implies much
more than just the access and use of this medium. The problem is not a
technical one, but one of social exclusion, manipulation, exploitation
and annihilation
of human
beings. It is vital that thought about African information ethics be
conducted from this broader perspective.

PROSPECTS

The final goal of ethics
is not just to speak about the good but to do the good and to
dream about it. We owe this insight about the relation between ethical
thinking
and action to Aristotle, the founder of ethics as a scientific
discipline in
the Western tradition. Our conference brings together scientists
and
politicians to discuss what could and should be thought
and done to create a good African information society. This conference
is
unique in several respects. First, it deals with
information
ethics in Africa from an African
perspective. Second, it encourages African scholars to articulate the
challenges of a genuine African information society. Third, our
conference is devoted to fundamental ethical challenges as listed in
our programme:

Topic 3: Development,
Poverty and ICT
- Using ICT for a better life in Africa: case studies
- Internet and exclusion (socio-political and economic exclusion)
- North-South flow of information and information imperialism
- Flight of intellectual expertise from Africa.

The expected outcomes of
the conference can be summarized as follows:

- To agree on theTshwane Declaration on
Information Ethics
in Africa.

- The
establishment of the Africa Network for Information Ethics
(ANIE) ANIE will cooperate with international
partners such as the InternationalCenter
for Information Ethics (ICIE), the International Society for Ethics and
Information Technology (INSEIT) and the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. ANIE will be housed at the School of Information
Technology, Department of Information
Science at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. It will act as a
platform for exchanging information about African teaching and research
in the field of information ethics. It will provide the opportunity for
scholars around the world who have a shared interest in African
information ethics to meet each other and to exchange ideas. It will
provide news on ongoing activities by different kinds of organizations
that are involved in African information ethics and related areas.

- The establishment of the
Information Society and Development Advisory
Council to
advise the South African government and other stakeholders on ethical
issues pertaining to the development of an African information society.

- To publish a Reader
on Africa Information Ethics that can be used as a textbook for
students and scholars. It will contribute to the development of a
distinct field of African information ethics.

- To ensure that African
scholars in this field are part of the international scholarly
community. This outcome will be achieved by the creation of a virtual research network linking disparate scholars. It
will be coordinated and maintained by the AfricanCenter
for Information Ethics.

- The initiation of research projects with the focus on grant proposals.
During the conference scholars and practitioners from around the world
will have the opportunity to meet in smaller groups to discuss and
identify possible research opportunities in the field of African
information ethics. It is envisioned that foundations such as the Gates
and Ford foundations will be approach for funding. The focus of the
research will specifically be on the practical implications of the
ethical challenges associated with the use of information and knowledge
sharing on the African continent.

- The establishment of a Summer School on Information Ethics that will be hosted
at the School
of Information Studies
at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The main purpose of such a
Summer School will be to train African practitioners and scholars on
relevant issues pertaining to African information ethics.

- To publish the proceedings of this conference in
the International
Review of
Information Ethics (IRIE) .

There is a short and a
long history of information ethics in Africa.
In the second part of my presentation I have pointed briefly to the
short one.
The long history concerns Africa’s rich oral and written traditions
throughout
many centuries about different kinds of information and communication
practices
using different moral codes and media based on dynamic and complex
processes of
cultural hybridization. Critical reflection on this history
promotes greater awareness of Africa's cultural legacy, which provides
the foundations of the digital information and communication
technologies that will create unique and genuinely African information
societies. An information ethics opens a space of critical reflection
for all stakeholders on established moral norms and values, it provides
the catalyst for a social process, and is a
space for retrieving the rich African cultural memory necessary to our
field. This
cultural memory permits to reshape African identities and contribute
to the world's information and communication
cultures.

Let us start this
fascinating debate on information ethics for and from Africa
with a well-known insight of Sir William Arthur Lewis: “The
fundamental
cure for poverty is not money but knowledge” Information and
communication
technology can, certainly, contribute to the goal of sharing knowledge
in Africa. Let us think together
about how to share
knowledge using ICT in Africa for the
sake of African
people. I am convinced that the best way to do it is in a mood of joy.
By this I mean the kind of joy that is uniquely African. The South
African Coat of Arms,
written in
the Khoisan language of the /Xam people, has a wonderful phrase in its
motto:

!ke e:
/xarra //ke

The /Xam
people did not use abstract
words such as
‘unity’
or ‘diversity.’ The motto can be translated as "diverse
people unite" (Smith 2006). It addresses
each
individual effort to harness the unity between thought and action in
and for an
African community: Today, the /Xam language
that
once was spoken in a large part of Western South Africa no longer
exists. Fortunately, it was recorded
by a German
linguist, Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, who was born in 1827 in Berlin. Dr.
Bleek wrote
the famous Comparative Grammar of South
African Languages published in London
in 1862 and 1869 (Bleek 1862/1869). By appointment of Sir George Grey,
Governor
of the Cape, Dr. Bleek was elected as
curator
of the South African Public Library in 1862. He occupied this position
until
his death in 1875. Thanks to Dr. Bleek the /Xam language survived in
12,000
pages taken down word-for-word from some of its last speakers, who gave
us the gift of their myths, beliefs and rituals. Let
us follow
the example
of Dr. Bleek by retrieving, saving and re-shaping the rich African
cultural
memory so necessary to our field.

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Morality and Democracy
in Africa. The Role and
Responsibilities of
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